Augustine and the Legacy of Guilt
Mary GreyThe task facing a feminist theologian when asked to reflect on the legacy of St Augustine and sin is indeed daunting. For when confronting contemporary understanding of sin and guilt, it is frequently assumed that the legacy of guilt and the whole burden of responsibility for sin which women have borne in Christianity is somehow to be laid at Augustine’s door. So the problem underlying this paper is basically a zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA
historical one: how much responsibility for pessimistic views of human nature can be traced to what Augustine actually wrote and taught? Secondly, to reflect critically on Augustinian notions of sin will inevitably obscure the positive dimensions of his thought-in particular, his viewson community, sacrament and Christology. For this I apologize in advance. But no one will thank me for tracing the legacy of Augustine’s teaching on sin through the anguishings of Luther and the rigorous extremism of Baius and Jansenius to the Papal encyclicals of this century. Instead, I begin by sketching sin-consciousness today. I then look briefly at Augustine’s doctrines in the context of 4th-century Christianity. Thirdly, I focus on certain threads, presumed to be the Augustinian legacy, and in the last section I look at attempts to represent ‘the sin of the world’ suggesting an alternative based on feminist psychological research.
I: Whatever happened to sin?
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What is striking today is a distinct absence of guilt feelings. Karl Menninger’s book Whatever Became of Sin? (Hodder and Stoughton, zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA 1973)’ drew attention to the growing absence of sin as a meaningful category, a factor which he attributed to the ‘original sin’ of our day, namely, flight from responsibility. A survey by the Dutch sociologist Kerkhofs (The Tablet, 26 February 1985) of Christian European attitudes to sin and guilt revealed that about 40% of those interviewed had never experienced any feelings of regret about their actions! Seemingly we are presented with a lack of moral awareness on a terrifying scale, as leading statesmen are exonerated from corruption scandals and SS officers from the Nuremberg trials onward present themselvesas guiltless and blame-free. We ourselves have been presented with the underlying causes of African famine which point to the responsibility of our society: but if Britain feels any guilt, she has learnt to live with it; guilt must not interfere with the politics of consumerism. 476
And yet there are moments which pierce this protective veneer: when Oppenheimer dropped the first atomic bomb, he declared, ‘and now science knows sin’.
Perhaps flight from responsibility can be a subtle form of internalised guilt: Hannah Arendt’s comment that ‘morally speaking, it is hardly
less wrong to feel guilty without having done something specific, than it is to feel free of all guilt if one is actually guilty,” alerts us to the full spectrum which guilt feelingstake. But what is taken as the all-pervading legacy of Augustine is the experience of being fallen in a fallen world, in need of redemption, salvation and integrity. The myth of the Garden of Eden is still present
as a symbol of this lost integrity, as primal innocence, nostalgia for a lost Golden Age, nostalgia which, as Harvey Cox once pointed outZ,travel agents have been quick to exploit by offering distant golden beaches, tropical fruit and illusory temptations to get away from it all! Nor is this sense of lost integrity confined to humanity: ‘Nature, too, mourns for a lost good’, as Tillich preached3;theentire creation is flawed. But the ‘fallenness’of thehuman situation is experienced in its strongest form through a sense of ineluctable corruptedness-total moral depravity in some Protestant evangelical circles-a pessimism about the body and sexuality, a belief that the will is flawed (we are either ‘weak-willed’ or ‘wilful’), and a sense of the inevitability of original sin, of which pride is the dominant expression-this last despite the frequent re-interpretations by theologians over the last twenty-five years.
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~OS,hard on the heels of the development of philosophic personalism, we have seen the breakdown of personal relationships on an enormous scale, going hand-in-hand with a recall to supposed traditional Victorian family values and a massive increase of depressive illnesses. It is this last factor which is most significant here. The sense of impending doom of the nuclear threat, the endangered environment and the punitive morality evoked by the Aids epidemichave seriously questioned the survival of the world, causing depression as to the future-or lack of it-for large numbers of young people.
Could this be the ultimate punishment for sin? Although both men and women suffer from depression, the causes tend to be different, and twice as many women asmen suffer from depressive illnessesand have to livewith depression as a permanent factor of their lives. (The suicidesof Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath and many others testify to the seriousness of this.) If there is an established link between lack of self-esteemand the way women internalise guilt for the sin of the world, is this part of the
Pessimism about humanity and the meaning of existence has taken many forms. For theologians like Tillich it was fashionable to speak of alienation, estrangement: ‘We are estranged from the ground of our being, from the depth of our existence”. Rollo May spoke of apathy5, resulting in a lack of ability to feel and experience, issuing from a disjunction of will, eros and creative imagination. This was the language of the zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA
60s. In the zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA
Augustinian heritage?
Finally, the one-sided analysis of sin as pride has brought many problems: if Augustine is right, how would he see the relationship between Christian and State in the teeth of the cultural legitimation of pride manifested in Thatcherism, which encourages self-mastery in exactly the way which Augustine denounced, and even negates the concept of society which he was at pains to construct?
One current response is to denounce Augustinian pessimism and the redemption spirituality it engenders. Matthew Fox’s broadsides arewellknown:
It (that is, redemption spirituality)practically wrote women off the faceof the spiritualmap, lockingthem up wheneverpossible zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA
...It has put the body down and calledthisrepression holy ...It has substituted private ‘righteousness’for biblicaljustice; it has taught sinconsciousness rather than peoples’ capacity for the Divine zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA
Thus Fox’s Creative-centred spirituality and much of the emergent Feminist Spirituality offer an alternative by uncovering therich resources celebrating creation, by beginning with ourselves asGod’sgood creation, and by focussing on original grace and blessing instead of sin. For many this is a satisfying approach, and certainly therapeutic to anyone with a weak sense of self-esteem. To me it has an unrealistic approach to evil and offers no theodicy. To understand why the experience of one man should still hold such sway-despite revisionist attempts-and why such a pessimistic interpretation of humanity as flawed should have taken such a penetrating grip, I return briefly to the years following that August ofzyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA 386 in Milan. zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA
II: Another tree, another garden, another city I begin with a sketch of Augustine’s views on sin. The first difficulty is our philosophical perspective: how can 20th-century thinkers, European post-Cartesian individualists of a Thatcher society, appreciate the worldview of a north-African bishop poised on the uneasy fulcrum of the Manichean-Pelagian see-saw? How can a society which expects a degree of gender awareness empathize with a world-view where, in the words of Peter Brown, ‘it is a comfortable and dangerous illusion to assume that, in much of the evidence, the presence of women is even sensed” (my italics).
Attempts aremade to explain Augustine’sdoctrine of sin in terms of his Manichean years, then in the context of his struggle against the Manicheans and subsequently in terms of his battle with the Pelagians, with the need to stress human solidarity in sin and guilt which only God’s grace can remedy. The Confessions of Augustine is an unparalleled account of a spiritual struggle with sexual desire, which remained all his life, and of which his opponent, Julian of Eclanum, appears to havelittle understanding. It is this struggle for control over desire which has such
1-3. Peter Brown, in his study of Augustine’ and his more recent book on
consequences for Augustine’s interpretation of Genesis zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA
Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianityg, shows how in the first three centuries the Genesis myth had been understood zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA as meaning that the source of evil lay not in creation-as in Manicheism-but in human choice. Even if Christian freedom and sanctity was interpreted in ascetic terms of sexual renunciation, this was a liberating messagein the context of a pagan society, where the Church was an island of hopeful serenity, surrounded by demonic forces. For John Chrysostom the story of the Garden proclaimed human freedom: for Augustine it was a story of human bondage. Thus the explanation is at a more complex level than simple the personal struggle of Augustine or the fact that the social scene had changed.
Augustine’s teaching, vividly depicted in both Confesions and City of God,contrasts two cities, earthly and heavenly, and the symbolismof two trees, the Tree of Adam’s temptation and that of Augustine’s own, over against which Christ, the Tree of Life, would offer the only hope. Writing thirteen years after his Baptism (c.400). recalling the time when he went stealing pears from the orchard, Augustine sees himself as summing up exactly the same human predicament as Adam: ‘In the sixteenth year of the age of my flesh
... the madness of raging lust exercised its supreme dominion over me’ (Conf. 2.3.). Through sexual desire, he says (and he means ‘concupiscentia’, ‘libido’ in a negative sense, not sexual desires rightly used), ‘my invisible enemy tracked me down and seduced me’ (Conf. 2.3.). But whereas earlier, rejecting the Manichean view of evil as energy, he had sought refuge in a Catholic interpretation of freedom of choice in the face of desire, the maturing Augustine thought that the will, though free, in practice is flawed and corrupted as punishment for sin.
This, then, is the key to the whole story. The sin of the Garden of Eden is the direct consequence of the fallen will. Sin in terms of pride-the dominant interpretation of this-is an expression of the corrupt will. Lack of control of sexual desire-concupiscentiaAibido-is equally an expression. But where Chrysostom saw Adam as a single individual, with the possibility of the choice not to imitate him, Augustine saw him as a microcosm of the human race:
The entire human race that was to pass through woman was contained in the firstman whenthat married couplereceived the Divinesentencecondemningthem to punishmentand humanity produced what humanitybecame, not what it zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA was when cmted, but when, having sinned, it was punished. (Cio of zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA God,13.3).
The orientation of the will in terms of self-assertion is a turn from greater to lesser good, the shift itself being ‘the original evil’. But no adequate explanation is ever given by Augustine of the causes of the will’s corruption. The will in pre-lapsarian time would have been entirely set on God”. But Augustine went further. The desire to master one’s willzyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA
is a fatal temptation-the desire for self-mastery is perversity, and the rebellion of sexual instincts and desires, which happens out of the will’s control, is proof and penalty of our rebellion against God and as such is universal and ineradicable. Not that Augustine invented the notion of original sin itself: the concept is found in Tertullian
zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA (De zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBAAnima zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA 40)and originates in an older Jewish-Christian belief in human solidarity in sin: what is correctlythe legacyof Augustine is the belief that each individual inherits punishment due to sin manifested by the flawed will. Why, then, was such a pessimistic analysis
so influential? Elaine Pagels in her book Adam, Eve and the Serpent” suggests the controversial thesis that Augustine’s theology of original sin could make intelligible not only the state’s imperfection, but the Church’s imperfection as well:
By insisting that humanity, now ravaged by sin, now lies helplessly in need of outside intervention, Augustine’s theory could not only validate secular power, but justify as well the imposition of Church authority-by force, if necessary, as essentialfor human nature.
(p.125)
According to Pagels, not only did Augustine’s views serve to legitimate the authority of the emerging imperial Church, but the fairly universal belief that disaster and suffering are the wages of sin offers us the alternative of guilt to helplessness (p.144). His view appeals, she writes, ‘to the human need to imagine ourselves in control, even at the cost of guilt’ (p.144). Guilt is the price to be paid for the sense of being in control over nature, for on Augustine’s view, as contrasted with Julian’s, death and suffering are always the punishment for sin, and not inbuilt into the structures of biological determinism.
111: Thelegacy
of Augustine
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There is a certain appeal about this solution, but I think, first, that she has too easily assumed that Augustinian pessimism over the individual’s internal conflict led him to advocate subjection to earthly authority: Augustine’s exaggerated gloom over the flawed will can be better explained by the need for re-creation in Christ and the life of grace; secondly, I think that existential guilt is a more complex phenomenon than either he or she suggests. It is on the relationship between this and what Augustine said that I now focus.
What then is the precise legacy of Augustine in relation to what he actually said? I concentrate on three points: first, the scapegoating of women for sin, particularly sexual sin; secondly, the dominant understanding of sin as pride; and, thirdly, the difficulties ensuing from seeing sin as disobedience: all three within a consciousness of being fallen, in a fallen world.
Can the blame for the scapegoating of women for sexual sin be fairly laid at Augustine’s door, as is usually the case in feminist theology? First, Augustine is clearly a man of his times in seeing women 480
De Gen. ad Lift.
as zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA the weaker sex, both physically and socially’2.(He uses words like ‘infirmior’, ‘imbecillior’, ‘fragilitas’ and ‘delicatior’ and finds support from the text ofzyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA
1 Peter 3.7, ‘Men, honour your wives, as befits the weaker sex’.) But it is not clear that he considered women as inferior morally, spiritually or even intellectually. When it comes to responsibility for sin he is clear that zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA both are guilty. The question of intellectual inferiority is ambiguous. Usually Augustine is accused of completelydespising women on thegrounds of texts like zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA
9.3.6, where he says that the only possible help a woman could be to a man is to bear children. But if seen against the background of the Manichean condemnation of procreation, it can beunderstood as a move by Augustine-inadequate though it may be to our eyes-to valorizethe physical aspect of marriage in contrast with marriage as mere spiritual friendship. But, because his world is hierarchically-ordered, he does see the submission of woman to man as part of created order, although this ought to be more in terms of loving service (DeGen. ad Lit?.
zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBAXl). It isthe punishment of sin which changes this to domination. But Augustinedoes not one-sidedly blame Eve for the sin of the Garden: But the man could not bear to be severed from his only companion, even though this involved a partnership in sin. He was not on this account less culpable, but sinned with his eyes open zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA
...Although they were not both deceivedby credulity,yet both were entangled by snares of the devil and taken by sin. (Cityof God, 14.11).
Given this, to what extent can Augustine be blamed for theimputing of blame for sin to women and our consequent internalising of guilt for it? First, the fact that he saw punishment for sin as sanctioning the social domination of men over women, stronger over weaker, continuestohave tragic repercussions. Not only sexismbut racism isgiven social sanction: Such as men are now, is the order of peace. Some are in subjection to others, and while humility helps those who serve, pride harms those in power. But, as men once were, when their nature was as God created it, no man was slaveto eitherman or sin. However, slavery is now penal in character,and planned by that law which commands the preservationof the natural order, and forbidsitsdisturbance.
(Cityof God,19,15)
But though Augustine saw the master/slave situation as punishment for sin and not as part of God’s original plan (City of God 19.15), the just exercise of this relationship is always exhorted. Here the relationship of ‘libido’ in sexuality and what Augustine calls the ‘libidodominandi’ (lust for domination) is important and often missed as a part of his teaching. He calls this ‘lust for domination’ ‘the most pitiless domination that devastates thehearts of men’ (Cityof God 19.15), and isthus aware of its misuse in public affairs, especially war. But he, and Church teaching of succeeding generations, have most frequently focussed on ‘libido’ in the context of sexuality and therefore the damaging links between the two which we now see-the sexual abuse of children and women in powerless
situations-have not been made.
Whereas Augustine alone cannot be blamed for not condemning slavery-he followsin a long tradition-yet it was the legitimisationof it
as punishment for sin which had harmful consequences, thus allowing Calvinism and subsequently the Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa to make tragic use of the belief in a divinely-sanctioned social order: the worst consequence of this is the internalisation by the oppressed of the mentality of the oppressor-a situation which Augustinewould never have wished.
Secondly,given this socialsanctioning of the domination of women both as punishment for sin and as being the weaker sex, the condemning of women to suffer pain in childbirth-an explicit part of Augustine’s theology, whereas Julian saw this as natural, and anyway subject to enormous cultural variations-has had damaging consequences. The severestimputation of blame to Augustine and his interpretation of Gen.
3.16 has come from Mary Daly and Adrienne Rich. The givingof relief to women in childbirth, wrote Adrienne Rich, according to the clergy, would ‘robGod of the deepearnestcrieswhicharisein timeof trouble’13. Referring to efforts to improve obstetric care shecontinues: ‘Thelifting of Eve’s curseseemedto threaten the foundation of patriarchal religion; the cries of women in childbirth were for the glory of God the Father’“. Thus shedescribesthe Rev. Richard Polwhele’scomplacentobservations on Mary Wollstonecraft’s death following childbirth: ‘She had died a death that strongly marked the distinction of the sexes, by pointing out the destiny of women, and the diseasesto which they were particularly liable”s. Even if this reaction is exaggerated-and Augustine himself would not haveagreedthat the criesof womenwere for the gloryof God the Father-it points to a paradox of Christianity. If we are a faith centering around the fact of Incarnation, God becoming human, it is paradoxical that the initial event by which this occurred-Mary giving birth to Jesus-should have to be seen to be so different from the way that ordinary women give birth. Thus Mary escapes the punishment of ordinary women: birth-giving, instead of being seen as a powerful symbol of Divine creative activity, is considered as rightly painful, and associated with the dubious legacy of out-of-control sexualityand with the sexual taboos which restricted women in both Judaism and Christianity.
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Tess of the D’Urbervilles, George Eliot’s Hetty in Adam Bede, Mrs Cranford’s Ruth, Charles Dickens’ Nancy in Oliver Twist, Tolstoy’s Resurrection, portray both the despised sexuality of the prostitute, or used innocent girl, and the doomed double stereotyping of the woman as idealised innocent virgin or sinner deserving punishment. All these authors echo
482
So, not only have women all-too-successfully symbolised the debased carnality of human nature-the phrase ‘fallen women’ sums it up accurately-but also, in many cases, have internalised the mentality of the ‘fallen woman’. Thomas Hardy’s Tess of zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA
quite amazingly 4th-century pessimism as to female sexuality. Whereas Augustine never made the explicit association of sexuality and death which Chrysostom did in zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA
De Virginitate(‘For where there is death,there is sexual copulation, and where there is no death, there is no sexual copulation either’), yet the pessimism is ever-present, even though he struggled all his life with the body’s importance for theology. And there is no escape from the gallows for Tess; Eliot’s Hetty is reprieved only to be deported. Nancy ismurdered by BillSykes,and Mrs Cranford’s Ruth, after a life of sanctity ‘expiating’ the wrongs inflicted on her, is killed off by a fever. Julia Kristeva, the Bulgarian feminist philosopher, sees the problem as being the difficulty of women in joining the symbolic, Christian, monotheistic, paternal social order. ‘All she can do’, says Kristeva, isto engageinanendlessstrugglebetweentheorgasmicmaternal body and the symbolicprohibition-a strugglethat zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA
will take the form of guilt and mortification and culminate in masochistic joukance. As St Augustinemarvellouslyput it, ‘No-one,to my way of thinking, would ever prefer virginity to martyrdom’ (Holy Virginity LXVII, zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA 47). Thus the ecstatic and the melancholic, the two great female archetypes of Christianity, exemplify two ways in which a woman may participate in this symbolicChristian order.I6
The tragic aspect of this is the violent abuse inflicted on women asa result of despised sexuality”. Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite has pointed out that many battered women collude in their abused status. That ‘she has deserved it’ isthesharpest pointer tothe fact that shehasinternalised the guilt of being woman. But in both these areas-the ethic of domination/submission in both racism and sexism-the causal connection with the actual teaching of Augustine cannot be proved. It is the link between the penal character of sin and its societal expressions which has proved so damaging.
Thirdly, thesocially-sanctioned subordination of weaker to stronger has been made worse by Augustine by his analysisof sinaspride. Pride is still cited zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA as the first of the deadly sins. Pridewas the dominant analysis of sin, according to Reinhold Niebuhr”, whose viewsarestill influential. Niebuhr’s answer lay in ‘the shattering of the self and in the concept of sacrificial love. Many feminist theologians have pointed out that ‘the shattering of the self‘ is a damaging concept where there is no positive self-image in the first place, a possibility which neither Augustine nor Niebuhr ever considered. Sacrificial love, said Niebuhr, ‘completes the incompleteness of mutual loveby initiating themovement toward a loved one without reckoning a re~ponse”~.This is relevant where there is a self to assert, not where it has never existed. The concept of ‘self-sacrifice’ can be extremely harmful: the radical feminist stance of Mary Daly and Sheila Collins-is to reject this violently, claiming it means ‘the radically unrewarding handing-over of their identity and energy to individual 483
males’2o. Sheila Collins insists that the preaching of virtue as selfsacrifice has ‘impaled women on the Crossof self-sacrifice’2’.While I see this zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA
redly want to deny the possibility of giving life and energy to a chosen ideal?-a point is made that sacrificial scapegoat imagery may fail to engender compassion and sympathy for theother. Thepsychiatrist Thomas Stasz argued that the inability to aspire to the ethic of selfsacrifice can drive a person into identifying with the oppressor. Thus the scapegoat role may help neither victim nor oppressor. As he argues:
To perceive blacks as victims does not, it seems, lead whites to sacrifice anything tangible to help the victims. The notion of sacrifice added to the burden of guilt almost guarantees resistanceand rationalisation.a
So, in conclusion, I argue, first, that Augustine’s analysis of sin as pride does not apply to those with weak or no senseof self. Augustine, indeed, is remarkable for his concept of ‘self-love’, both in terms of the natural attraction present in friendship and the tendency of any organism towards self-protection. He is remarkable in that it is difficult for him to harmonise this ‘amor sui’ with a lovebased directlyon God: but he never considers the situation which I describe-that sin demands a wholly different analysis, when there is no real self to start off with. Valerie Saiving Goldstein’s now famous article on ‘The Human Condition’23
(1960) had argued for two basic forms of sin (although this was already noticed by Kierkegaard in The Sickness unto Death?. Pride is rightly seen as the dominant sin in a culture which values external achievement, self-assertiveness, self-differentiation, independent individualism and the separation of humanity from nature. But this frequently does not describe the temptations of women as women. These, says Valerie Saiving Goldstein, arebetter suggestedby suchterms as triviality,distractibilityand diffuseness, lack of an organising centre or focus; dependence on others for one’s
own self-definition;tolerance at the expense of standardsof excellence;inabilityto respect the boundaries of privacy; sentimentality, gossipy sociability and mistrust of reason: in short, underdevelopmentand negation of self.z
as a dangerous dismissal of the concept of sacrificial love-would anyone zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA
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What is described here is more one form of female sin, which is in fact much more complex. Its relevance for theAugustinian legacyis that where Christianity’s dominant symbolism is that of Cross, sacrificial imagery, the injunction to ‘lose your life in order to find it’, where, in other words, thevictim role is idealised and socially-sanctioned, the guilt of women is increased. Hence much contemporary feminist literature concentrates on the quest for self. ‘This above all: to choose nor to be victim’, says the nameless protagonist of Margaret Attwood’s novel, Surfacing26.True self-denial could be taken on, writes Carolyn Osiek, ‘only when a woman had sufficient psychological maturity to come to terms with her own sinfulness of fear, passivity and paralysis’”. Thus by being insensitive to the way pride is socially structured through the 484
dynamic of dominance/submission-in other words, considering it in isolation from the social structures in which it is lived out-Augustine made it possible for the oppressor/victim situation to beintensified,even reinforcing the victim in his/her own oppressed situation. Finally, by seeing pride as the sin of disobedience-both to external commands and to the sinful self-obedience to superiors has been sanctioned in many cases in a way harmful to legitimate self-development, and in extreme casesas avoidance of personal responsibility. That ‘I was merelyobeying orders’ has masked culpability for numerous atrocities.
I V: Original sin revisited
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Thinking did not freeze with Augustine, although his remained the dominant Christian interpretation of human nature until this century. But recent revisionist attempts are now influential. For example, Schoonenberg’s re-interpretation of original sin as ‘the sin of theworld’, the result of our ‘being situated’ in sinful contexts and structures, has moved us forwardm. But how does our ‘being situated’ relate to Augustine’s ‘punishment for sin’? Guilt, according to Schoonenberg, is only incurred when original sin is considered existentially, when it is realised that ‘the sin of the world’ will always be accompanied by ‘some faint foreshadowing of a personal decision, probably of a personal sin’m. We collude, we exercisesomecomplicity in our situation. Yet we arestill left with the problem of the flawed will and damaged sexuality, and Augustine’s interpretation of suffering and death zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA as the wages of sin.
Considerable insights are offered by philosophy and psychology. Thewill is seen as integrated with theintentionality of thehuman person. Psychoanalytic theory has attempted to explain motivation through the influence of unconscious drives, and the conflict-often unconscious-between ego, id and superego. There are similarities-but not identification-between the pre-conscious libido and conscious ego, and the struggle for control between flesh and spirit. But there isno need to appeal to a fall from a superior state to explain id-ego conflict: Lamentation over an imagined lost paradiseis replaced by hope for an originally flawed but improvable human nature, hope that the divided self may become whole, and will and appetites
Sebastian Moore sawthe experience of evil astheprice of self-awareness, as the birth of self-consciousness and the dawning of self-awareness3’.
Similarly, Dorothee Soelle saw the Fall more as a story of human development than as a lapse into guilt and sin. But Revisionist attempts, in order to present a more profound grasp of the human situation before God, need to take into account the gender implications of the internalisation of guilt and sin. Yet Feminist theology offers much more than a gender analysis of sin. I believethere zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA
isaway to meet the conflicts engendered by the flawed will with which Augustine wrestled, but, owing to a deficient anthropology of human nature, remained entrapped.
First, contemporary understanding attempts a less fragmented zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA
approach to human nature, showing sexuality as deeply integral to human personhood and therefore to spirituality. Sexual intercourse is considered as an integral and potentially enriching part of marriage-a possibility which, sadly, Augustine could not envisage3*.Secondly, feminist theologians like Rita Brock and Carter Heyward are trying to redressthe negativeeffectsof the denigration of the body by creatingnot just embodied theology, but a theology integrating sexual and erotic feeling. Thirdly, an aspect of the spirituality of the Wicca movement, zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA as described by Starhawk, is the recovery of the power of the female will. But this is not evokedin the senseof self-assertionoverzyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA against another, but attuned to the will of the group or community, and sensitive to environmental influences of wind, seasons of the year, as well as to bodily feelingand spiritual discernment.
My own suggestion as to a way forward is based on Heidegger’s ontology of care, developed through feminist psychology as part of a theology of mutual relation. The ‘being situated’ of the human person, the ‘da-sein’of Heidegger,ischaracterisedby carefor being. Care, asthe concreteenactment of the potentiality of being, endowsthe ‘being-there’ with all its worldly capacities-not the least of which is ‘willing’ or ‘volition’
zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA:
The phenomenon of care in its totality is essentiallysomething that cannot be tom asunder, zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA so any attemptsto trace it back to special acts or drives like willing and wishing or urge and addiction,or toconstructit out of these, will be unsuccessful.... Willing and wishing are rooted
So, power to exercise choice is grounded in structures of care: ‘In the phenomenon of willing, the underlyingtotality of careshowsthrough’u. Time does not allow discussion of the difficulties of this view as contrasted, for example, with that of Ricoeur. What is interesting is the way that Heidegger’sassertion that only when touched by the reality of being, namelyCare, is ‘Da-sein’ableto question motives for choicesand assess responsibilityfor enacting them, fits with feminist developmental psychologyand derivingethicalstructures. I refer, of course, to the work of Carol Gilligan3’, Jean Baker Millers and the ongoing work of the Stone Centre for DevelopmentServicesand Studies, as well as to recent work in Process philosophy. Gilligan’s theory, that women operate on the basis of an ethics of care, as opposed to Lawrence Kohlberg’s of justice (fairness or respect for rights), issues from an understanding of the self-in-relation, within an organic understanding of the universe based on mutuality and interdependence. But what Heidegger wrote is contradicted by the experience of women: ‘When fully conceived, the care structures
include the phenomenon of elfhhood'^'. And Rollo May adds,
zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA with ontological necessity in ~aseinas care...”
zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA
When we do not care, we lose our being, and care is the way back to being. If I careabout being, I will shepherdit with some zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA
attention paid to its welfare, whereas if I do not care, my being disintegrates.’*
Yet much of women’s experience points to the opposite. Where developmental paths are faithful to empathizing with others, enhancing a sense of connectedness with others, in fact caring for being and making choices from this connectedness, because society’s structures are not those of caring, and relational qualities are devalued, this has contributed to low self-esteem, an increase of guilt and the frequency of female depression mentioned earlier.
Augustine’s legacy has had consequences which he would not have wished. For, in a society where self-assertion and competitive individualism are highly prized, fidelity to care for being in a Heideggerian sense, to connectednesswith others within a relationalview of the world, has brought in many cases guilt and the apparent punishment of depressive illness. But if, instead of a one-sided analysis of sin as pride, sin could be seen as far more complex, namely, zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA as setting oneself against the relational grain of existence-the refusal of care and connection-on both interpersonal and structural levels, then ‘falling’ would not be related to an imagined historical primeval fault and inherited guilt: rather, falling would become ‘fallinginto co-creation’ in the formation of structures of integrity. Surely then the human city would manifest not the structures of domination, but the structures of care, by giving voice to the voicelessand power to the powerless zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA
Eichmann in Jerusalem. Rev. Ed., Penguin, Harmondsworth. 1%3, p. 298.
Harvey Cox, The Seduction of the Spirit, Wildwood House, London, 1974.
P. Tillich, ‘Nature, too, Mourns for a Lost Good’, in 7’he Shaking of the Foundations, Penguin, Harmondsworth. 1963.
P. Tillich, ‘The Depth of Existence’, in ibid.
Rollo May, Love and Will, Dell Publishing, New York. 1969.
Matthew Fox, WesternSpirituality: Historical Roots. Ecumenical Routes. Bear and Co, Santa Fe, 1981,p. 3.
Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity, Columbia University Press, New York, 1988,p. xvi-xvii.
Peter Brown, Religion and Society in the Age of Augustine. Faber and Faber, London, 1972.
Peter Brown, The Body and Society, op cil.
See W.S. Babcock, ‘Augustine on Sin and Moral Agency’, Journal of Religious Ethics 1988. p. 28-55: ‘But it is in relation to the angelic fall that Augustine explicitlyaddresses the question of the origin of evil will, and here, despite his best efforts, his analysis swivelsbetween a position that, in effect, reduces the first evil act to a random outcome, a chance association between agent and act, and a position that, in effect, makes the first evil will a function of God’s withholding aid.’
Elaine Pagels, Adam, Eve and the Serpent, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, London, 1988. For critical reviews of her controversial thesis see R.J. O’Connell. in Theological Studies 50/1/1989/p.201,and Gilles Quispel in Vigiliae Christianue 4311/ 19891~~.100- 103.
Hannah Arendt, zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA
I acknowledge a debt to Professor T.J. Van BavelOSA of the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium, for his comments and for his article zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA Augustinus’sDenken over De Vrouw. Bijdragen 48, (1987). pp.362-3%.
Adrienne Rich, Of Woman born: Motherhood zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA as Experience and Institution, New York, W. and W. Norton, 1976, p.168, cited in Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecologv: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism, London, The Womens’ Press, 1979, pp.258-9. ibid.
ibid.
Julia Kristeva. ‘About Chinese Women’, in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Tori1 Moi, Oxford, Blackwell, 1986, tr. Sean Hand, p.147.
The victim status of women has even been used as an argument against the ordination of women: ‘Well are women warned from serving on the altar zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA
Womens’ flesh lives out the quest of the Grail...’
Charles Williams, TheRegion of the Summer Slurs. D.S. Brewer, Cambridge, 1938, p. 26-7.
Sex, Sin and Grace: Womens’ Experience und The Theologies of Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich. Yale University 1976. p.134.
Who, by nature of their creation, from Caucasia to Carbonek, share with the sacrifice the victimisation of the blood zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA
Rcinhold Niebuhr. The Nature and Destiny of Man. Vols 1, 11, New York. 1964. Cited in Judith Plaskow, zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA
Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology, p.374.
Sheila Collins, A Different Heaven and Earth. Valley Forge, 1974, p.84.
Thomas Szasz, quoted by Collins, A Different Heaven, p.89.
ValerieSaivingGoldstcin, ‘TheHuman Condition: A Feminine View’, in Journalof Religion, ~01490,1960,reprinted in WomanspiritRising, eds. Christ and Plaskow, Harper and Row, San Francisco, 1974, pp.25-42.
S. Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death, New York, Doubleday. 1954, 183-4. Goldstein, op. cit., p. 37.
Margaret Attwood, Surfacing, The Womens’ Press, London, 1979.
Carolyn Osiek, Beyond Anger, On Being u Feminist in the Church, Gill and Macmillan, Dublin, 1986, p.79.
‘This fact of our being situated’, he wrote, ‘isan inner determinism of every human being and this corresponds to the fact that original sin exists in everybody as something proper to him’. P. Schoonenberg, Mun und Sin, London, Sheed and Ward, 1965, p.186. ibid. p.181.
Stephen Duffy, OriginalSin Re-Visited, in TheologicalStudies 49, (1988). p.612.
‘We are stumbling after a union with a dreamed-of and unknown God and that is our greatness and our wretchedness’. Sebastian Moore, ‘Original Sin, Resurrection and Trinity’, Lonergan Workshop 4, (1983), pp.85-98.
‘The fatal flawof concupiscencewould not haveseemedso tragic to Augustine. if he had not been even more deeply convinced that human beings had been created to embrace the material world. Thebody wasa problem to him preciselybecause it was to be loved and cherished’. Peter Brown, The Body and Society, op cit., p.425. Heidegger, Being und Time, New York, Harper and Row, 1962, tr. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, p.231.
ibid., p.232.
Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice? Harvard University Press, 1982.
Jean Baker Miller, Towardsa New Psychology of Women, Boston, Beacon, 1976. Heidegger, Being and Time, op cit.. p.370. Rollo May, Love and Will, op. cit.. p.286.
